New Year, same old rambling thoughts January 5, 2010

It’s not Friday but, heck, it’s a New Year, there are many of us who might appreciate a non-techie, pointless ramble at the start of the first full working week of a new decade…A Friday Philospohy for the New Year. {If anyone wants to point out the New Decade starts on 1st Jan 2011, go take a running jump – popular opinion is against you, even if logic is for you}.

I found the UKOUG techie conference this year particularly interesting as it was the first major meeting I have been to since I started blogging, and I came across two main opinions about my attempts:

Those who like my blog as it is “chatty” and rambles a bit.
Those who dislike it – because it is “chatty” and rambles a bit…
{oh, and the third opinion, the most common, of utter ignorance of my blog – there goes the ego}.

Well, you can’t please everyone. I was a little saddened, however, as I spoke to a couple of people I really admire in the Oracle Knowledge world and they landed on the “chatty and rambling – bad” side of things. Damn. But they are so good at what they do, I forgive them. The swines.

But then I remembered what I said to a fellow blogger the other month. We bloggers/twitterers all put forward what we blog about in our own style. We might not blog something that is new, we might blog something that is “well known”, but we put it in our own style. Some like it, some do not. It matters not, so long as it adds to the sum of decent knowledge out there.
Some will hate our style and not read, some will read and enjoy. So long as the information gets out there to more people, that is fine.

So, do I think everything I blog is decent knowledge? Oh, I wish. I like to think it is mostly there {and I wish it was all correct} but I am realistic. I test most of what I blog, or I have lived for real most of what I blog, but I will make mistakes. And sometimes I will hit the edge of something good and I put it up there in the hope others will contribute {like the recent one one translating min-max column values into human readable stuff}. And often people do contribute and that is really, really good.

But I do and will continue to make mistakes, be daft, or just put things poorly. I have learned a fair bit in the last 8 months about written communication, the art of communicating to a global audience and also about how not to spread a topic over several weeks as you hope you can “just finish of those half-written blogs in an hour or two” and find it takes weeks. If anyone wants to give me any constructive criticism, please do, but maybe use my email (mwidlake@btinternet.com) rather than flame my postings.

And my last rambling thought for the start of 2010? I am probably going to post less in the next 6 months. I am always sad when the blog by someone I enjoy goes very quiet, but then we all have real jobs to do, so I try to be patient. In my own case, I have noticed I now read a lot less of other people’s blogs as writing my own takes so long. And I am missing too much. There are blogs I really admire or I have discovered in the last 6 months (sometimes both) that I simply fail to really read and they know stuff. So I need to read them. I am going to try and maintain a steady 2-3 blog entries a week, but for the next 6 months I am going to concentrate on learning. Something blogging has taught me is I am really quite ignorant :-)

Good wishes for 2010 to all and everyone who stumbles across my ramblings.

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>popular opinion is against you, even if logic is for you
Hmm… How is logic even for them?
Did the noughties not start on 2000/01/01 00:00:00 and therefore end after a full ten years at 2009/12/31 23:59:59?
When people talk about the eighties did these start in 1981 and the seventies end in 1980? etc. I think not.:)

The year zero thing, decades and millenia (there was something of a counter-culture “2000 is not the new millenium, 2001 is” thing going on 10 years ago) is logically correct, but we humans are not logical. After all, what is really significant about a digit in a number (using a base that matches how many fingers we have) changing? Or needing a new numeric? All those Gru’Hungs from planet zarg with 3 hands and 13 fingers between them won’t get it at all :-) They will use base 13. Maybe.